Short hops and hard knocks with Red Sox beat writer Ian Browne.

After sleepless night, Cherington completes eventful day

So, how much sleep did Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington get on Trade Deadline eve?

“Didn’t [sleep] last night and maybe not much the previous couple nights,” Cherington said. “A lot of coffee and other stuff. We had to see what we could do and try to take advantage of the unfortunate position we’re in. Hopefully we were able to do some things that give us a headstart on that.”

The first domino fell between 3 and 4 a.m. Thursday, when Cherington and Billy Beane created a rare blockbuster of All-Star Players. Jon Lester, along with Jonny Gomes, went to the A’s. Yoenis Cespedes, who could give the parking lot behind the Green Monster a workout, comes to the Red Sox.

“I don’t know if I’m going to get the time exactly right — but we had an agreement in principle on like the structure, it was probably between 3-4 this morning,” Cherington said. “And then, you know, you’ve got to get through medicals and Major League approval and all of that stuff, so it doesn’t get really official until later. So sometime in the middle of the night.”

Then, there was the deal that sent John Lackey to the Cardinals for Allen Craig and Joe Kelly. Then, the one that sent Andrew Miller to the Orioles for lefty prospect Eduardo Rodriguez. And finally, the one that sent shortstop Stephen Drew to the Yankees for Kelly Johnson.

Cherington put his battle plan in motion about a week ago, when the Red Sox went through yet another slide that took away the momentum of winning eight of nine.

“We’ve made a series of trades today that we believe give us a good head start on building again and hopefully building towards a very good team as quickly as possible,” Cherington said. “Our intent going into today and really this week was just, given where we were, given where the team was in the standings and given the math that we’re fighting coming into this week, our intent was to try to see what opportunities are out there for us. There was a lot of interest in our players and we wanted to see if there were opportunities to turn that into moves that like, I said, could give us a head start on building again and becoming better as quickly as we can. That was our general sort of guiding philosophy this week and hopefully we turned it into some moves that make us better now and give us a real head start the rest of the season and going into the offseason with the full intent of building a strong contending team for 2015.”

It was a collaborative effort, as Cherington and much of his staff worked into the wee hours of Thursday to re-shape the roster.

“We had a group of 15 or so of us that were sort of consistently in the room, and that’s a combination of front office folks and scouts and ownership’s in and out,” Cherington said. “Roughly 15, and then that gets bigger, gets smaller sometimes. It gets a little smaller by 4 in the morning. But yeah, you know, we were here the whole time.”

That’s been the case for the last week or so.

“Long days and long nights. As everyone knows, you all know, for every trade you do make, there’s 20 or 30 other iterations that don’t come together. Even for the ones you do make, especially bigger ones, and some of these are bigger ones, those require a lot of phone calls, a lot of work from a lot of different people. We haven’t slept much the last three or four days,” Cherington said. “You can probably tell. But we knew coming into this week that we had a job to do: We had to find a way to take advantage of the unfortunate position that we’re in and try to kickstart a little bit building the next team. So that’s what we try to do. It was a great team effort from a lot of people, including ownership, but certainly baseball operations, and John Farrell is involved. We worked around the clock, literally.”

“I think I’m proud of the group that I work with because it’s a group that literally worked around the clock for about 4-5 days to try to do this. And again, time will tell what the results are, but I’m proud of the people I work with for how hard they worked. They were prepared and ready and, you know, everything we needed to give ourselves a chance to make decisions was there thanks to the people that I work with. As far as challenging, I just think this year has been challenging. Use any word you want. It’s been frustrating, disappointing, hard to explain at times, and certainly as I said before, I take responsibility for where we are. So I think the year, it’s not the last two days, it’s the whole year’s been challenging. We’ve got to get better. We know that.”

Thursday might have been the first step back to contention for 2015 and beyond.

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